Working Memory And Children's Mental Addition And Subtraction

Since 1970s, mental arithmetic emerged as a topic of cognitive psychology research. Although the researches on the relationship between working memory and mental arithmetic exist with a great amount, cognitive scientists still argued much on the issue whether or not the three systems of working memory exert during the mental arithmetic process. Further researches on these issues are supposed to be discussed. In this paper, children with different mental arithmetic ability were recruited to test their span of working memory, inhibition function and mental arithmetic score with the mental arithmetic questions that were presented via various forms and styles.The results indicated that:1. Children with different mental arithmetic ability have discrepancy on the span of working memory and inhibition function, on which normal children are significantly better than challenged children;2. Different surface forms (the missing number is sum,minuend,addend) and different difficulty of mental arithmetic questions can influence the performance of mental arithmetic. The harder the questions were, the poorer the students performed. Moreover, the students performed best under the missing number which is sum but worse under the missing number which is addend;3. For the two surface forms of the missing number which are minuend and addend, inhibition function dominates the correction rate. the better the inhibition function is , the higher the rate is;4. The presentation styles (video or audio presentations) affect the performance for mental arithmetic. Specifically, video presentations are better than audio presentations on all the levels of difficulty;5. Phonological loop and the central executive exert in the mental arithmetic process while no evidence of visuo-spatial sketch pad exerting in the mental arithmetic has been found in our study;6. Under the video presentations, the central executive can predict the reaction time better and the Phonological loop can predict correction rate no matter how the questions are formed. However, under the audio presentation, the predicting functions of these two devices alternate each other;7. For the questions presented visually, the children usually make mistakes due to the forgetting or misremembering of the information in the presentations.